My pile to go back to the library includes Harlan Coben's, Fool Me Once, a good typical Coben about a woman who's dead husband appears on her nanny cam (good twist at the end); and Sheila Weller's, Girls Like Us, a biography of Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon. It is a big, dense book which I didn't expect to finish but did and enjoyed along the way.

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Every man is, or hopes to be, an Idler. -- Samuel Johnson

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On vacation this weekend, and read Stephen King's Joyland, a coming of age story/murder mystery set in an amusement park on the Carolina coast. I liked it much more than many of King's more recent efforts (11/22/63 is a notable, excellent exception). At less than 300 pages, it was a quick and easy read. Recommended for King fans.

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I can't complain, but sometimes I still do.
- Joe Walsh

Book 1 My Brilliant Friend. For me, hard to get into and to follow with so many Italian names thrown at you ---but with frequent reference back to the list of characters in the front of the book I was glad to stick with it because it gets better...it sets up books 2 and 3 which I found extremely compelling. (book 2 The Story of a New Name and Book 3 Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay). The last book (The Story of the Lost Child) left me a little disappointed but I was glad to get through this amazing 1600+ page opus.

People talk about it being a feminist story. I am not a woman, so what do I know, but it just seemed a very human story. About childhood and friendship, and love and loss, and youth and aging, and work and life, and a very different culture. I never appreciated before how very different life and politics in a Western European city could be from what we know in the USA.

This is a great series of books that I highly recommend.
But it is a big commitment.

I've been reading Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health. It's pretty interesting. The author, Dr. Welch, isn't a conspiracy theorist. He's just noticed that by decreasing the numbers for various conditions (diabetes, cholesterol, BP, Osteoporosis, etc), millions of additional people are now defined as sick, and even more as pre-sick. But the people that get picked up by the lowered number are also the people least likely to actually develop the condition. And by treating them as if they were high risk they are at risk for all the negatives caused by the medications. Basically, the medical/pharma professions are exposing many additional people to dangerous side effects in the effort to save a very few from the effect of the disease. He says it's all with the best intentions (covering his butt with his fellow doctors, I'm sure), but that they need to pay more attention to the cost/benefit aspect of treating people.

It's a very interesting, although not very exciting, read. If you are interested in the interactions between the medical profession and people I would recommend it.

I'm also in the middle of The Promise by Robert Crais. The most recent Elvis Cole novel. It's good and entertaining as are all of his books.

__________________"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement." - Will RogersDW and I - FIREd at 50 (7/06), living off assets

I'm just finishing Matthew Desmond's Evicted. I got it on audiobook for my long daily commute and it is very compelling. Desmond is an academic (and winner of a McArthur grant) who actually moved into two slum areas of Milwaukee to research this book and tell the stories of the people in the book.

I learned a great deal about the reasons why the worst housing stock is sometimes the most profitable, and how these folks who pay more than 60% of their income for rent manage to survive.

A worthwhile read, as he has a great gift for making their stories come to life, including both their bad decisions and their bad luck, in an unvarnished look at life on the fringes in a big city.

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“One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure it's worth watching.”
Gerard Arthur Way

I'm cheap so I set up an alert at bookbub.com
Daily emails of free or almost free books base on the profile you set up. These are mostly Kindle versions, some from established authors, quite a few from new authors. But hey they're cheap or free.

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You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

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